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Short Takes: Jindal stockpiling cash for '11

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. AP Photo/Bill Feig

Eyebrows in Washington were arched --if not fully raised -- from a story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune earlier this week that detailed Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's (R) aggressive fundraising schedule in advance of his 2011 re-election race.

Jindal spent Monday raising cash in Houston and then traveled to Michigan yesterday to fundraise for that state's Republican party. As the Times-Pic reports, Jindal has kept up a very active travel schedule in recent months, hitting Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Connecticut, New York, California and Mississippi.

Advisers to Jindal caution not to read too much (or much of anything) of national import into Jindal's level of activity in recent months, insisting that his only goal is to raise massive amounts of cash for his re-election bid in 2011.

Those sources note that while Jindal ended last year with $3.5 million in the bank and there is no obvious Democratic opponent on the horizon, he is taking the better safe than sorry approach given that in 2007 there were two self-funders in the race who spent millions against him.

Left unsaid but no less true is the fact that national Democrats will do everything in their power to put someone serious up against Jindal to try to slow his momentum and keep him occupied heading into 2012.

As we have said before, it's hard to see Jindal as a serious 2012 candidate in his own right since he has pledged to run for re-election in 2011 and it's close to a logistical impossibility to be in Shreveport and Sioux City at the same time.

That doesn't mean, however, that Jindal's aggressiveness on the fundraising front in advance of his re-election race doesn't have some national implications. Traveling the country to raise money helps build and expand the sort of national cash-collecting operation that any serious candidate for president -- in 2016 or beyond -- will need.

Like a lot of the left, nodebris's consistent philosophy is potent taxes and crippling debt.

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Your screed against taxation is predicated on the belief that taxation is a drain on the economy. There is no evidence to support this. You seem to believe the the government takes money from people who have earned it for purely punitive reasons (you call it "penalizing success," doubleplusgood duckspeaker) ... and burns it.

In reality (you should get acquainted) revenue from taxation is used to maintain the society .. education, infrastructure, defense-ha-ha-ha, and unless that money is thrown away in other countries or on disposables like military hardware, it ends up back in the economy.

"creatin' joooooobs"

And debt? OK, debt's not good. But a Great Depression is a lot worse. Eight years of Republican economics had us sinking resistlessly into a depression, instead thanks to Obama we now have a bad recession instead, and we have some debt that we will have to pay off. We can and we will.

leapin has morphed into Paul Krugman. Krugman has been calling for an additional "jobs" stimulus for months now.
And here I thought leapin was a right-winger.
Posted by: mnteng
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I also calling for accumulating a “new job created” every time Dem cronies gets a raise with the stimulus money and every time a lib flushes the toilet. The later creates jobs for the local water commission.

Jindal is still very young compared to others in politics. Jindal knows he has a long political career left, if he so chooses. Raising massive amounts of cash is a good thing if you want to stick around in politics. If Jindal is able to raise massive amounts of money he may be able to avoid any real threat from a democratic candidate in 2011 and cruise to reelection easily. If that happens, he may want to extend his political career in the short term by challenging US Senator May Liendrieu in 2014, as he would be term limited from his 3rd term in 2015. If he won reelection & a US Senate seat in 2014, he would be primed for a run for President in 2016 if he so chooses. Jindal has a bright future for a long time to come.

Leapin has one thought in that cotton-head of his, and he posts it everywhere.

I suppose we could just un-tether those 10 states (temporarily) in the most trouble and just push them out to sea, but then what would all the Red States do when there was no one left to pay Federal Taxes to take care of their aging, isolated, under-producing populations? They'd have to put down their crystal meth, their guns and their Bibles and try to come up with some ideas of their own. I suggest abstinence -- it'll take a while, but it will solve their problems.

LA is not on the list of 10 states in deep fiscal trouble which is very good for Jindal. People are noticing that 8 out of 10 of those states are run by liberals (with CA run by a RINO) as are most of the large, depressed US cities.

Mark, yeah, I think Jindal is pretty set for 2011. Albeit, there's still a long time to go and no real challenger for Jindal at the moment. And yeah, Louisiana is a red state, but is more than willing to vote for Democrats it likes. Mary Landrieu is a centrist Dem and Baton Rouge is frequently occupied by a Dem. In fact, the party seems to flip quite a bit. He's very popular at the moment, though.

As for Nagin, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but I think the two of them have a good working relationship. Jindal says all the dog whistle stuff about religion, abortion, evolution, but he's also been willing to spend money to assist with NOLA recovery and he handled the Gustav evac last year a lot better than Blanco did with Katrina. (of course, Gustav did nothing to the city, so it's not easy to compare)

How could anyone be a shoo-in 2 years out, Mark? For all we know, Jindal may get a challenge from the right by then, for failing to be sufficiently 'conservative' which is to say, by governing, being an incumbent with a record.

I also was thinking that Jindal knows that one of the main reasons he won in the first place was the huge post-katrina backlash against Governor Blanco, who had beaten Jindal four years before. He won't get that same knee-jerk vote this time around and it may be that he is shoring up money to discourage a real opponent from emerging, such as Mitch Landrieu the LT Gov.

Jindal will NEVER be the GOP nominee for President. The talk of him on the national stage was a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that we voted in a black president. The fact of the matter is that there are too many openly racist members in the core of the GOP that will never vote for a person of color. And in a general election he won't win any southern state, which is essential for a GOP candidate to be a serious threat.

Also LA has had its share of problems of late, from the still very slow reconstruction of NO, to budget deficits, and it still reigns as one of the worst states in terms of education, public health, job growth, etc. If the democrats can get a legitimate challenger Jindal may be up for a real race.